-

Probably less than Fantastic...

 Here's the latest word, including heavy rumors and references to doubtlessly outdated scripts, on 2005's Fantastic Four movie, largely courtesy of Ain't It Cool News.

As previously mentioned, Michael Chiklis (The Shield) will portray Ben
Grimm/the Thing. Now joining the case are Iaon Gruffudd, who can currently be seen as Lancelot in the new King Arthur movie,
playing Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, and Chris Evans,who starred in Not Another Teenage Movie, as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch.

The rumor mill is currently pushing (and other sources are trating it as confirmed) Dark Angel's Jessica Alba as the movie's Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman. At the moment she's in Texas, playing a part in Frank Miller's (and he isn't kidding, as he has a co-director and script writing credit for the film) Sin City, which is also set for 2005 release.

Also being strongly pushed is Ray Liotta as Dr. Doom. That the only scripts seen so far have removed Doom's status as a monarch. The worst references appear to peg him as "...a jilted, vain lover with a lot of money..." That makes me think we're going to see him played more as a twist on the Phantom of the Opera. Also, considering how much they'd likely be paying to get Liotta in the role, I have to wonder how much of the film they're going to want to place him behind a mask?

That, meanwhile, Ari Avrad is waxing enthusiastic about the film is hardly a surprise, considering the huge sums of money he makes from brokering these projects for Marvel. The interview confirms both Jessica Alba's casting and that the $90 million FOX film will be an action comedy, though to be fair he calls it "funny, high adventure." I've been trying to not let the extremely short professional career of Barbershop director Tim Story lead me to negative presumptions, but they creep back in every so often.

The film, whatever it'll be, has a July 1, 2005 release date. The only opening weekend competition it has scheduled at this point is Mission Impossible 3, so in my book it's already winning.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
Insurance Company-Driven Propaganda Storm It's almost heartening to see them go to these lengths - they're getting a little scared - though I worry how many wingnut media outlets will reference the report as if it's substantive..? ( From the Washington Post ) The Insurance Industry's Deceptive Report by Ezra Klein In the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries, the health insurance industry has commissioned a report (pdf) projecting doom and despair for those who seek to reform its business practices. The report was farmed out to the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has something of a history with this sort of thing: In the early-'90s, the tobacco industry commissioned PWC to estimate the economic devastation that would result from a tax on tobacco. The report was later analyzed by the Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting group, which concluded that "the cumulative effect of PW’s methods … is to produce patently unreliable results.&qu
Read more

The Tease of Things I Don't Need

-
Image
     The lure of things we don't need, could easily find greater needs to apply the cash to, and which we may not even have the space for, is a very First(ish) World Problem, to be sure.        HasLabs is a special projects division of Hasbro, that occasionally pitches large and/or elaborate items - oversized figures and/or vehicles - essentially crowdfunding each project. They set the price, and a funding line - the number of people who need to pledge to buy one (or more -- up to five) at the announced price, then collect the names and information of interested parties for a period of 45 days. Once the number of pledged buys hits the target, the project is greenlit.      A couple years ago there was a HasLabs special build project aiming to fund a production run for an oversized (32" tall), elaborately-articulated action figure of Marvel comics' Devourer of Worlds: Galactus. Back on July 18, 2021 I posted a piece on the project, which at the time was just two days
Read more

Oct.13-19 - More Returns and Changes

-
Image
      Even though I've already watched the pair of debut episodes of Frasier (see next paragraph), and this week's Star Trek: Lower Decks (which continues to do a stellar job of mining  previous Trek series for character, episode and extraterrestrial culture lore and deftly applying them at breakneck speeds), I still have multiple things I'm looking forward to catching up on, including new eps of Gen V (Amazon Prime), Loki (Disney+), and both Archer and Welcome to Wrexham (both on Hulu), along with the first two episodes of a final six for Doom Patrol over on Max... and that's just off the top of my head, so getting this week's streaming post out of the way brings those one step closer for me.       I've watched the two episodes of the new Frasier series that arrived on Paramount+ this week, and while it was a mixed bag it was good to see the character back, with him attempting to move into his third act by returning to Boston, where we first met the ch
Read more